The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003

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Themes

Psychopathy and “Alienism”

In 1801, French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel became the first psychiatrist to diagnose “mania without delirium,” or deviant behavior in the absence of psychotic symptoms. In 1835, British psychiatrist J. C. Prichard used the phrase “moral insanity” to refer to individuals who made impulsive decisions that deserved moral condemnation and who were incapable of effective decision-making. These people, despite their intelligence, served their own interests, yet became largely dependent on others. In the 1890s, J. L. Koch suggested that physiological makeup was partially responsible for what we now call psychopathic behavior. Koch used the term to refer to all personality disorders. Krafft-Ebing linked psychopathy with deviant sexual drives, which enlarge greatly on normative sadistic impulses, leading to unprovoked violent behavior. Later, Freud referred to “criminality from a sense of guilt,” whereby the individual felt relief from guilt immediately

after committing violent and aggressive acts. Dr. Hervey Cleckley, to whom Larson refers, was writing in 1940s America.

The term “psychiatry” was first used in 1908 in Germany by Johann Christian Reil. George III of England was committed to what was then called a lunatic asylum in 1788, and asylums became more common throughout the 19th century. Benjamin Rush, the founding father of American psychiatry, recommended bloodletting as a treatment for mania in 1812. In 1894, American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell accused the institutions of losing touch with proper medicine. Psychopaths like Holmes could no doubt proceed more easily without the comparatively mainstream public awareness of the psychopath today. Yet, as Larson writes in 1885, William Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette identified a “new malady” and stated, “Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath” (87).

What in the late 19th century was called “lunacy,” and its treatment by the alienists of the day, runs thematically throughout the book. The “White City” is described as “dreamland” (282): Prendergast walks “face-first into a tree” (226), and Olmsted worries about being sent “to an ‘institution’” (379). The street lamps of Chicago blossom, Larson writes, “like moonflowers” (17). Larson characterizes Holmes within this surreal context as a Cleckley psychopath, an individual for whom sanity is a mask: “[H]is description is noteworthy for what it revealed, without his intention, about his astigmatic soul” (42). Much of Larson’s characterization of Holmes focuses on the killer’s seemingly mesmeric blue eyes: “When his eyes settled back upon his captors, it was they who fled” (38); “If the photographer saw anything in Mudgett’s eyes, it was a pale blue emptiness that he knew, to his sorrow, no existing film could ever record” (40); “Events and people captured his attention the way moving objects caught the notice of an amphibian: first a machinelike registration of proximity, next a calculation of worth, and last a decision to act or remain motionless” (36). For Larson, Holmes’ way of perceiving was problematic, but more importantly, so was the way he was perceived.

Journalism and Detective Work

Pinkerton National Detective Agency was founded in Chicago in 1850 by the Scotsman who claimed to have foiled an assassination attempt on Abraham Lincoln. When the American government first established a detective force, it subcontracted services through Pinkertons. It was in 1891 that the adventures of Sherlock Holmes were first published in The Strand Magazine in Britain. Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective was based on Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, who is widely considered the first fictional detective, although there were numerous French precedents. Holmes probably read Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), and there are several horrifying echoes of the fiction in Holmes’ all too real murders.

When Larson writes, “[O]nly Poe could have dreamed the rest” (3), it may quite literally have been the grim reality that Holmes dreamed of his future crimes while reading Poe during his youth. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” begins with the isolation of the men in a dilapidated mansion, not wholly dissimilar from Holmes’ deathly World’s Fair Hotel. The murders entail dissection and target women, just as Holmes’ did. In a strange and horrific twist of fate, the real detective, Detective Geyser, who made national news as he searched for the third of the missing Pitezel children, would find the body of 8-year-old Howard stuffed into a chimney just like the child in Poe’s tale. Sadly, it was not an orangutan but Holmes who performed heinous murders in the vein of Poe’s simian killer. In this sense, Larson is aware of a certain parallelism in the detective story genre, between the activities of the killer and the author, the detective, and the reader: “At one point during the Holmes investigation Chicago’s chief of police told a Tribune reporter he’d just as soon have a squad of reporters under his command as detectives” (395).

If the activity of reading is eroticized in the crime thriller, with its suspense, subtle clues, and sudden shocks, then its fascination as a genre is surely that capacity, first worked out by Poe, to bring the civilized public (represented by Burnham’s ideal city), so close to the world of the “animal” that walks among us, perhaps even within us. Becoming aware of what Carl Jung would call the Shadow then, facilitates the maturation of society in his formulation. The arising of this awareness in public consciousness is repugnant due to the nature of violent and malevolent acts and what they tell us about humanity’s capacity for evil. Yet the revelation of this knowledge is as compelling as it was in Eden:

To me every trip to a library or archive is like a small detective story. There are always little moments on such trips when the past flares to life, like a match in the darkness. On one visit to the Chicago Historical Society, I found the actual notes that Prendergast sent to Alfred Trude. I saw how deeply the pencil dug into the paper (396).

Fear, fascination, and even the satisfaction of our own deeply repressed murderous impulses propel the writer and readers’ hunts in parallel for answers. A little like the hotel trap laid by the successful serial killer, no one escapes this fatal play of gazes unscathed.

Magic and Mystery

In an 1895 drawing of Svengali the despicable hypnotist, his creator, novelist George du Maurier, represents him as a spider at the center of his web. Larson’s view that Holmes gained a sense of satisfaction from possessing his victims, first through manipulation and later through their demise, is compelling considering Holmes’ methodology. He bears some resemblance to such a predatory spider, catching passing tourists in the net of his charm and purpose-built killing castle. There are plenty of firsthand accounts cited by Larson throughout the book that characterize Holmes as a master manipulator and illusionist, akin to Svengali. The spider-like Svengali attracted Holmes attention when he read du Maurier’s 1894 novel. Holmes also read Poe’s series of detective stories that includes tales of murder, and the short story, “The Purloined Letter.” This tale revolves around the mysterious contents of the letter in question, but as psychoanalyst and literary critic Jacques Lacan has pointed out, it is more specifically about the secrecy inherent in language itself.

For Lacan, duplicity is intrinsic to what he calls “the speaking subject” (Seminar 10). Taken to an extreme, the duplicitous personality of the psychopath is described in The Mask of Sanity by Hervey Cleckley, for whom the psychopath is:

[A] subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly […] So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real (86).

When, at the end of his life, Holmes describes his imagined transformation into the similitude of the devil, he is simultaneously real and fallacious. It appears that in unmasking him, detectives have revealed the full duplicity of his character for the first time. In appealing to an archetype that transcends the individual, Holmes is not only elevating himself above his dire circumstances but claiming an essentially fictive identity. Larson seems conscious that this too is the inevitable fate of history. In death, its enactors are transformed into reconstructed fictions.

Literature is the magic that enables Larson to draw his readers into an encounter with the makers of history. Yet literature, like Faustian magic, implicates those who practice it. Larson is drawn into the web of desire and fascination that connects the ethically disparate individuals in his tale, implicating his readers by association. Larson notes how in Burnham’s day, the writer and the detective were conflated: “At one point during the Holmes investigation Chicago’s chief of police told a Tribune reporter he’d just as soon have a squad of reporters under his command as detectives” (394). The magician must pay for his magic with his soul, and Larson does not shy away from identifying in some respects with the now notorious serial killer.

It is through identifying with the criminal that Poe’s Detective Dupin can unravel the crime. In Dupin’s investigation, he discovers that it is the very play of gazes that constitute and maintain the letter’s puissance, which is to secure its contents from detection. Larson notes Holmes’ “talent for deflecting scrutiny”; the killer was able to operate under the noses of the Chicago detectives and the police force specially mustered for the fair (364). In this sense he was indeed an even greater illusionist than Olmsted with his “spontaneous” “minor incidents” (276), or Bloom’s hyperbolic public relations. Like Milton’s Satan, Holmes’ devilishness is due to his affinity with the snakelike seduction of language itself.